That said, sharia based constitution still enjoys wide approval.
The fraud in the Egyptian elections was so prevalent that it would make any U.S. Democrat apparatchik jealous with envy.
NOTE: A friend adds: “The Egyptian situation is so messy and the reporting by the major media is so superficial that I have the feeling that any layman can almost do as well as they.”
The problem with that narrative is that it relies on a number of assumptions, and none of them are true: 1) That the Brotherhood is democratically elected by millions of votes, 2) that their constitution was legitimately instated, and 3) that they are a legitimate political party through the FJP. Regarding the first assumption, since the parliamentary elections, the opposition forces have been screaming bloody murder regarding the votes the Islamists received, after uncovering systematic fraud in the voter rolls and issued government ID’s that found the existence of up to 9 million fraudulent and non-existent votes. A good example to study would be Al-Wafd Party’s Ibrahim Kamel case in Menufiya, who – after a voter came in with multiple government IDs asking him which poll station she should go to first- found in his district’s voter rolls hundreds of names each repeated as many as 32 times in his district. Upon further investigation he found out that the many of the names with the same ID number have been repeated up to 600 times nation-wide. No one investigated from the state or cleaned the rolls, which inexplicably had 12 million more eligible voters added to them 9 months later, because 12 million voters have all turned 18 in one year (hint, we are a country of 80 million people, do the math). 1994 must have been the year they introduced Viagra to the Egyptian market or something.
Helping the Brotherhood survive is the narrative of outright lies that they keep spewing to the international media, thanks to their incorrigible spokesperson Gehad El-Haddad, who has been saying the word legitimacy so many times he is starting to remind us of Morsi’s last speech (57 times. 25 minutes where legitimacy was said 57 times), coupled with “military coup”. Nobody seemed to ask him what kind of military coup comes with a 48 hours ultimatum, since coups are usually surprising and immediate. I guess the military likes to give people it intends to overthrow a 48-hour head start to spoil their plan. I guess, according to international media, their sense of fair play extends to coups. The Egyptian military: nicest coup-throwers ever!
